The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition / stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff / shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the / ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us, / ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and / love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling / fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with / the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so / interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of / different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it / would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous / mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated / papers, such as _Tit-Bits, Science Siftings_, and many of the / illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds / of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost / incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more / popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious / debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous / passages in Bradshaw's Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings.

It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother / Seigel's Syrup because he wished to know what eventually happened to the / young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap / detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever / our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we / gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at / the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy / bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is / absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves / with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To / read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be / a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise. It is this fact which / constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this / particular branch of popular literature.